


like blood, like love

by autoclaves



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: 1k of eve failing to deal with the s2 finale, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Eve Polastri-centric, F/F, Missing Scene, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, mentions of depression/mental illness, takes place in the liminal space between s2 and s3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:14:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23712796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: The line between ecstasy and pain blurs when in the presence of another body, which suggests that a gunshot, like the one fired at Eve, would be on the other end of the spectrum—dispassionate, and cruelly so. No hands, no blood. No bodies at all. It means that Villanelle hadn’t really meant it, a part of her argues. Eve doesn’t try to refute the point.(Or: Eve lives. She dreams very quietly.)
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	like blood, like love

**Author's Note:**

> title is from pauline albanese's "the closed doors": "tell them that you weren't hungry, tell them you followed the pomegranates seeds because they tasted like blood, like love."

_ And the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces.  
_ “Scheherazade”, Richard Siken

—

Villanelle leaves on a Friday morning. 

More accurately, Villanelle manipulates her into killing someone, wants to run away like Bonnie and Clyde, shoots her when she refuses, and  _ then _ leaves. On a Friday morning, not that that seems to be the defining detail here. 

It is a singularly shitty experience for everyone involved.

After it all, the days slide by in a loop. Eve is only aware of their passing in the vaguest of terms. The hospital she’s taken to is sharply antiseptic, and Eve spends most of her time sedated as heavily as possible, as heavily as the doctors allow her to be. Pain is proof of concept, and she can’t have that. 

Is this how Villanelle had felt, recovering in whatever corner of the world she retreated to after Eve tried to stab her guts out? She’ll have to send flowers or something, a belated apology; she hadn’t known it would hurt so much. Even the buzz of morphine behind her eyes fails to dull the worst pains, and she wonders whether a knife wound would ache the same way.

Too late, she remembers that she isn’t supposed to think about Villanelle anymore.

_ Fuck her,  _ Eve says into the privacy of her own head.  _ She fucking shot you. She put a bullet in you, Eve.  _ But then again, Eve had tried to kiss her, and then slid a knife through her stomach, so it’s not like she has room to comment.

(There had been an almost animal intimacy to it, one that she wants to deny. Warm metal, perfume. The blind shuddering of the lungs and Villanelle’s blood soaking into her bed. To be that close to someone while committing an act of violence against them; that brings with it its own twisted brand of responsibility. A duty of care as to how they lived and died.) 

The line between ecstasy and pain blurs when in the presence of another body, which suggests that a gunshot, like the one fired at Eve, would be on the other end of the spectrum—dispassionate, and cruelly so. No hands, no blood. No bodies at all. It means that Villanelle hadn’t really meant it, a part of her argues. Eve doesn’t try to refute the point.

She sleeps. She dreams, sometimes. 

Rome floats back to her in slices and fragments, in floral haze. There’s the red of Villanelle’s shirt, and the red of the blood on her hands, both stark against a white-marble landscape. _Eve,_ Villanelle says. _Eve,_ and she’s crying out now. She’s bleeding to death on a hotel floor, in Aaron Peel’s full-length mirror, in the middle of the ruins standing close enough to touch, entry wounds mottling her skin every time. A thousand iterations of Villanelle, saying, _Eve, Eve, Eve_ like it means something. In her dreams, Eve eats the apple. Eve throws it away. Eve knifes it open. Persephone and her pomegranate seeds, or a variation on the theme. Eve eats the apple. Villanelle grins at her, mouth full of white lies. 

The wound closes, and the hospital releases her. 

_ You’ll be fine, honey,  _ one of the nurses tells her kindly.  _ It was a clean shot, and we got the bullet out of you almost immediately. _ Eve is tempted to ask if she can keep it. The bullet, or whatever is left of it. She feels an unsettlingly strange sort of attachment to the piece of metal that could have ended her life, but didn’t. 

She steps out of the hospital ward for the first time in weeks, and London rushes past. It looks like the world has tilted on even in her absence. She’s out of a job and likely under surveillance, after what she pulled in Rome, so she goes out of her way to declaw herself; Eve Park, harmless and eccentric, newcomer to a shabby one-bedroom in east London. She keeps odd hours, works a minimum-wage job, and only speaks to her new neighbors when she picks up the mail. They pity her, she realizes, the other tenants on her floor. That’s good. Pity keeps them at a distance. More importantly, pity is uniquely preferable to fear. They would be looking at her with different eyes if they ever find out how she had used an axe to murder a man not four weeks ago, if they realize how hard her heat beat while carefully slicing open Villanelle.

Her dreams are less vivid than the ones she had at the hospital. She forgets most of them by morning, but it’s not as if she doesn’t know what they’re about anyway: apples and pomegranates. Red spilled over her vision.

When she’s awake, the lethargy of routine threatens to kill her, and strangely, it’s not as exciting as when Villanelle tried to do the same.

Villanelle had felt like mania, the high of it candy-colored and hyperreal.  _ I feel—wide awake.  _ Without it, Eve doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’s had a hit and now she’s shaking from it, blown-open pupils humming with a restlessness she can’t place. Doesn’t want to place.

_ I love you, _ Villanelle says to her on the worst nights. She’ll sit across from Eve at her little dinner table that’s tilted at an angle because one of its legs is shorter than the other three, and say it out loud like it isn’t a confession.

The moon sheds its waxing light through the blinds. Eve puts another bite of cold rice into her mouth.

_ Go away,  _ Eve tells her.  _ You’re not here. _

Villanelle looks offended at that, brows shooting straight up. She’s in a frilly black number, all lace and satin, and the upper half of her throat is milky-bare.

_ Of course I’m here, Eve. I’m in  _ here. She reaches out to ghost a finger in the space just against Eve’s temple. Involuntarily, knowing better, Eve leans forward, but of course the expected touch never comes. Villanelle draws her hand back, and her grin is a glint in the dimness, a flash of triumph. 

_ You won, okay? Now go. _

_ Not until you say it,  _ Villanelle singsongs. 

_ Not real. Not real not real not real, _ Eve repeats to herself, gritting her teeth until the force of it makes her see stars. This Villanelle isn’t real. She’s an illusion, empty air and empty words like everything else.

But this Villanelle is the only thing she has left. A close enough substitute that Eve can live with it. It’s pathetic, but she needs this apathy gone; she wants the mania, the wide-awakeness. (In her dreams, Eve seizes the apple and knifes it open.)

She doesn’t respond, but Villanelle steamrolls on as if she had.  _ Say that you love me.  _ She’s gleeful now, eyes sparking—this version of Villanelle can feel glee. She can imitate emotions and mean them.  _ Eve, tell me you love me. Tell me, tell me. You love me, don’t you, Eve? _

Her shoulder chooses that moment to twinge, a lightning-quick spasm back to reality. It’s rainy tonight, and the ache lingers sourly when it rains. A phantom pain for a phantom woman.

She had been wrong; this is no substitute for Villanelle at all. She says all the right things and tilts her head in the right way, cat-like, but she can’t compare, not really. In Rome, Villanelle had been close enough for Eve to see every individual eyelash, every freckle and blemish on her skin. All of it was glistening unreachable and larger than life. Hyperreality.

The figure in front of her smiles again, and this time, the motion is unbearably dull. 

_ I love you, _ Eve tries out in a low voice, just the once, to see how the curl of it feels in her mouth. It sounds desperate even to her own ears. It doesn’t sound unconvincing enough.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


End file.
